Stephen Sefton, July 20th 2025
Modern history is full of examples of the collective West's abuse of unilateral coercive measures as an economic weapon to attack the peoples defending their sovereignty. Apart from the decades-long genocidal economic aggression against North Korea and Cuba and also against Iran and Venezuela these arbitrary and illegal misnamed sanctions have been used against dozens of other countries around the world. The collapse last year of the legitimate government of Syria resulted largely from the commercial and financial aggression that caused the country's economic system to collapse.
At the end of the 1980s, after ten years of war, Nicaragua defeated an economic and military aggression very similar to that against Syria, when Commander Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista government managed to bring the US terrorist war to a negotiated end via the 1990 elections. This kind of imperialist economic aggression backed by the threat of massive military attack has a long history. Among the most notorious cases is Haiti, forced to pay a completely spurious debt through an agreement negotiated under duress in 1825 with the colonial power, France.
France extorted a total of 150 million francs from Haiti, on the pretext of needing compensation for the loss of its plantations and its slaves resulting from the country's war of independence. Haiti only managed to pay off this ruthless extortion by falling into a spiral of indebtedness and restructuring, in order to pay the exorbitant agreed quotas. The process took 122 years of ruthless sadistic bleeding of an entire people and thier national economy by a great power of Europe’s anti-civilization.
Thus, economic aggression by means of indebtedness destroying the prospects of dignified human development for the majority of peoples in the majority world is not a new phenomenon. Haiti was the first example of a colonized country that fought and won its independence only to fall under neocolonial domination through the financial power of predatory Western elites. This is a pattern that has been repeated systematically since the last century’s years of decolonization. It is worth noting the obverse of the case of Haiti in the form of what happens when a small country attacked by some big imperialist power manages to reverse that aggression by the way of international legal process.
In 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the US government for its terrorist aggression against Nicaragua. The court ordered the terrorist US government to pay compensation of US$17 billion to Nicaragua, which the US government has not yet complied with. The big powers apply international law so to impoverish the peoples of the majority world, and flout international law when it is up to them to pay what they owe. But of course…
The struggle for financial sovereignty
A significant motive of the 2011 NATO country armed aggression to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast was the project both advocated for an independent African currency, backed by gold. They hoped to be able to free West African countries from the domination of the neo-colonial CFA franc financial system controlled by France and linked to the European currency, the Euro. For several years before the coup that overthrew him in 2011, President Laurent Gbagbo had proposed abandoning the CFA franc monetary system. In 2004 he said, "Unless we have sovereignty, our states will never be able to know stability in Africa. And we must stand firm to force those who call themselves our financial partners to respect the leaders elected by our people.”
The destruction of Libya and the neocolonial, UN fomented coup in Ivory Coast in 2011 could not delay the profound process of emancipation in West Africa that has now resulted in independent anti-imperialist governments in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. However, all these countries face the dilemma of how to disentangle themselves from the international financial system dominated by Western elites. The criminal governments of the collective West fear the economic power of the BRICS+ countries because the development of an alternative financial system would offer highly indebted countries the option of escaping the control of institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the system of multilateral banks associated with the World Bank.
Argentina, for example, would be able to denounce the patent illegality of the anomalous agreements negotiated with the IMF, reject the debt as odious and recover its sovereignty without fear of reprisals from the Western financial institutions that have bled the Argentine people dry for decades. The recent summits of the BRICS+ countries have highlighted the fundamental importance of having an alternative to the Western financial system. In recent years, little by little, their governments have been assembling the essential components necessary to achieve that essential sovereign financial independence in order to promote the true human development of their peoples.
Financial sovereignty and democratization
Among these components, stable financial institutions are required capable of guaranteeing the efficient development, management, investment and exchange of capital in the form of money or different financial instruments such as stocks, bonds and derivatives. A system of banks and other financial intermediaries is essential to facilitate efficient cross-border payments using local currencies, with robust insurance systems and other financial services such as, for example, reliable risk rating agencies. Together, all these components should promote robust, well regulated financial markets. It's a formidable challenge.
From the perspective of the majority world, it is not a question of completely displacing the Western financial system, but of democratizing international commercial and financial relations. All the declarations of the summits of organizations such as the BRICS+ group or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization reinforce this message as an essential part of the modernization of international relations. To that end, much progress has been made in the development of digital national payment systems such as the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) of India, and other fast payment systems around the world.
However, it is necessary to develop the interoperability of these payment systems for cross-border transactions using automated clearing houses and distributed ledger technology. Recent advances in digital finance technology allow the development of increasingly accessible, fast, safe, cheap, secure and reliable systems. But, at the international level, the implementation of promising initiatives such as BRICS Pay or the mBridge systems requires the complex, inclusive harmonization of many technical and regulatory aspects.
The imperative underlying the complex details of the regulation and technology of these systems is the growing urgency of not becoming dependent on systems controlled by the ruling elites of the collective West. The experiences of countries subject to unilateral coercive measures categorically demonstrate that the Western financial system is nothing but a neocolonial variety of sophisticated organized crime. The most notorious examples in recent years have been the aggressive sequestration of monetary funds and material assets belonging to Iran, Venezuela and Russia in an effort to extort political concessions from their governments and make them submit to Western demands.
The true nature of this financial and economic aggression is demonstrated by the fact that they are always accompanied by brutal terrorist attacks against the target countries’ civilian population. Western governments have used the war in Ukraine to facilitate multiple attacks against the civilian population in many cities of Russia. The U.S. government has actively collaborated with the Israeli government to assassinate Iranian scientists working on their country's civilian nuclear program. Likewise, the U.S. government continues to support terrorist mercenaries to sabotage Venezuelan electricity generating and oil infrastructure.
As in the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s and Cuba and Democratic Korea since the 1950s, the crime of Russia, Iran and Venezuela is their refusal to submit to the collective West’s ruling elites. It is in this punitive context that the exclusion of Iran and Russia from the Western SWIFT cross-border payment system should be seen. The governments of all countries in the majority world recognize the threat of this type of criminal extortion by Western ruling elites.
New alternatives
That is why China, Russia and Iran have developed their own sovereign payment, compensation and cancellation systems such as China's CIPS system, Russia's SPFS, and Iran's SEPAM. In 2024, the US government and the European Union began to apply punitive measures against financial institutions that participate in Russia’s SPFS system. But the unification of SPFS with Iran's SEPAM in 2024 shows that Western threats are no longer as effective as in previous years. For the moment, the attacks of Western ruling elites against the BRICS+ group of countries as such have been restricted to the bellicose rhetoric of President Trump and his threats of high tariffs.
It remains to be seen whether unilateral coercive measures will be applied against the BRICS+ countries’ New Development Bank (NDB), which now has Anton Siluanov, the Russian Finance Minister, as chairman of its board of directors. The latest US unilateral coercive measures against Brazil add greater urgency to the imperative of strengthening financial collaboration between the BRICS+ countries. The NDB, together with the Chinese-controlled Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as similar independent institutions, can play an important role in the democratization of the international financial system.
This international context highlights the crucial importance of financial sovereignty. In Latin America, US and European aggression against the Bolivarian Alliance of our Americas (ALBA) vision of solidarity and sovereignty aims precisely at destroying independent exchange and financing instruments such as Petrocaribe and the ALBA Bank. The recent integration of ALBA members Bolivia and Cuba as partner countries of the BRICS+ group opens up new options, along with the intensification of Russia and China's economic collaboration with Nicaragua and Venezuela. These processes, in addition to cooperation relations with other countries under attack, such as Iran and Democratic Korea, offer significant opportunities to break the economic stranglehold of the collective West on the human development of our peoples.